I signed up to offer my assistance for the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium in social media, primarily in managing the Symposium’s @MITCIO Twitter account. In the end, I got much more than I expected, between the planning meetings with genuinely smart people and seeing how a conference of this magnitude comes together.

Another benefit was getting to work with some new content and social media tools, primarily the paid versions of Feed.ly and HootSuite (Yea! for people with budgets).

They worked well together. HootSuite was great for planning and scheduling mass uploads so I could schedule out a week of panel members links or scheduled events, including the day of event posts as each new panel was scheduled to start.

Feed.ly’s advantages were in curating CIO-related news. Every few nights, I would go in and schedule 2-3 daily tweets around news updates, so I could keep a good balance of posts between event updates and CIO knowledge sharing.

The highlight of the day was actually seeing the #MITCIO hashtag appear in the trending column when the conference was spread across five panels after lunch.

In the end, I was able to capture of my earlier photos from day to get Lindsey Anderson, MIT Sloan CIO Symposium, Chair, as he signed off and announced the date for 2018.

This is the last image I used for the close of the MIT CIO Symposium to announce the 2018 event.

LGT Challenger (Binghamton, NY) – With crowds this small, it’s always interesting that they have such tight media rules.

The Levene Gouldin & Thompson Tennis Challenger is happening this week. The tournament fits in as a minor league level event. That means that the best players may be ranked in the 100’s and many are breaking playing their first tournaments. Their claim to fame is that an unknown Andy Murray won in 2005 before going on to win the 2012 US Open and then Wimbledon in 2013 and 2016, so you never know if you are seeing a future star.

What caught my eye was first that there were so few people on this Saturday. Granted it was not the finals and it was a miserable 85 degrees and 90+% humidity.

Next were the signs that basically cut down on all internet fun even though it certainly was needed to help stir up some publicity. I’m sure the reason goes back to some lawyers making sure that no one tries to livecast from the US Open, but this event is a little off that track and should actually encourage this these tournaments to be experimental platforms for broadcasting (text or video) from a live event.

The weather may have been very wet on Saturday, but we made it into Washington, DC, to celebrate our daughter’s birthday by touring the White House. The president was in Los Angeles for the weekend, but we didn’t let that damper our enthusiasm either.

Overall the tour isn’t very long, and the tour confirmation note described the tour as being a self-guided, 45-minute tour, but it is what you make of it. Our daughter managed to befriend one of the secret service people on the tour route who allowed us inside the East Room tour ropes and gave us a special up-close view of the George Washington’s official portrait — Did you know it misspells “United States of America” on a book spine?

Some more pictures are posted at Flickr, they show a timeline that starts with smiles, but soon fatigue sets in when we get to the National Mall.

The biggest struggle of the tour, as we live in this social media world, is the need for restraint as phones and cameras are not allow. There are very clear signs for no photography or social media allowed, so you can’t do any selfie check-ins from Blue Room.

It was back to Times Square today for the DigiDay Social event and thanks to some video being available it will be able to bring you some information.

In a session “Publishing for Social Media” Jim Bankoff, Chairman & CEO of SB Nation, discussed using social media to drive traffic to generate revenue. It could have been 2005 at AOL where Jim’s content team passed that same message to those of us on the search team. The goal then was to use search to drive traffic to higher CPM pages. Now just change “search” to “mobile” and the story is the same

The first of the two videos is from Rishad Tobaccowala, Chief Strategy & Innovation Officer, VivaKi. He spoke about The People Network and the top piece of advice from him when it comes to working with new technologies is to use them.

The other video is along the same path — it’s not a case study, but it goes more to approach. This is from Adam Kmiec, Director of Social Media at Walgreen’s. He discusses choosing partnerships, asking your agency “explain”, and look for a wow factor that can separate your program from your competitors. He cited Walgreen’s program to donate a flu shot for every Foursquare check-in and how that beat CVS to the punch.

ROI is always important, but I think the issue at this stage of the social commerce experience the difficulties is in identifying the ROI + vs -.

It’s straight forward to do the simple math of how much you took in vs how much you gave away, but there are other numbersthat need to factored in, but they may be tough to qualify.

Off the top of my head, so please add others:
Some positives:
1) After the buyer gets the $X of product for the $Y they spent, did they by more?
2) Did they come back again?
3) How about the publicity of being promoted to all the subscribers and then virally to the friends of the buyer

Some negatives:
1) Need to generate more margin to make up for discount
2) discounts bought by clients who would have paid full price anyway (make it sound like a ‘treat’ for them in the copy)
3) Does discount hurt the brand? Could it turn people into ‘waiters’? That wait until deals come out before they come back?

Today is the day. The tactic used in social media to stir up interest: The Countdown. Just like I did to get you here.

First my apologies for using a self-serving trick, but I did so to make a point. And that is — it works. Even with nothing really to offer I added 14 new followers in the last 3 days.

The best thing about the Countdown tactic is that it’s really easy. The only challenge is the planning because you have to get out in front of it to give you the lead time. What should you do:

Find a reason — a new product launch; the anniversary of an event in your industry; anything with some relevance and value to your intended audience.

Layout your announcements. I think it’s best to write them up in one sitting, so when it comes time to execute it’s just a matter of paste and schedule. Remember that these are just teases, so they shouldn’t be too long, so writing up a bunch isn’t that difficult. I advocate this, rather than write as you go, because it’s tough to stay on topic and on schedule if you write as you go over multiple days.

Plan your Twitter posts to hit different parts of the day. Not everyone reads Twitter at 8am, so spread them out at different times to hit different users.

Coming Next Week — Just 4 days until I give you the next most popular tip: What do you think it is?

Some people do puzzles to stay sharp, I like to run a marketing model. The kind where I set up a spreadsheet, make some assumptions and justifiable estimates, and then hope like hell my hypothesis is in the ballpark. From there I usually have to spin it to make it easy to digest. Good times.

This week an idea came up about the effectiveness of using PR to support a regional project that would cover Central to Western NY vs using a Facebook Fan page.

Here’s some background with the names changed.

About the Newspapers:Below are the five largest regional newspapers and their circulations that I found by searching around. The two assumptions that I added are:
a) Views – each purchased newspaper is viewed twice
b) Impressions – I assumed that an article like this would be read by 20% of the buyers.

Bottom Line: Getting an article in each newspaper in the region would be seen by 180,000 people.

Now, Facebook:a) Group size – I used 30,000. I realize that this is a fairly large group, but there is a similar group in the region that already has more fans than this, so it is certainly achievable either working independently or doing a coordinated project with the other group.
b) Impressions – Total impressions are generated by getting “Like” clicks and comments that will then get your post to appear on Facebook walls of non-fans. To determine how many impression a single announcement post would get, I used 5 impressions/fan. This is a very conservative estimate since it is based on the impressions I get for another project that is non-consumer so less viral, but let’s go with 5.

Bottom Line: A post to our groups Facebook page would get 150,000 impressions.

From the bottom line numbers it seems like newspapers would still prove the strongest plan.

Intangibles:If you ever placed a newspaper article, you know how much work it is. Now think about doing that for five newspapers. It’s a lot of work to get thos 180,000 views. Along with the work, you have also relinquished the message to local writer, so you have lost some control in the message. Now let’s look at the effort for doing a Facebook post. Once you tweak the voice of your press

Now let’s look at the effort for doing a Facebook post. Once you tweak the voice of your press release to talk directly to your buying audience, you can post it right up. You control the message and you don’t have to do all the follow-up and scheduling involved in the newspaper placement. For this I estimate 150,000 views.

But still 150K is still less than the 180K for the newspapers, so why is this better. First the work effort is less, but #2 is the big thing — you can do it again next week!! Why not? Add a few new pictures and an update to the schedule, and bam! Another 150,000 views.